I'm confused. When I go get ... is it "phoning home" to Google? I could wireshark it, but since we're all here...
Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
81–90 of 324 posts
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#82I think this is a fairly misguided rant, and ignores the real priorities (and risks) that I have as a developer - both personally and professionally.
I'm happy to use languages funded by corporations - the incentives for them are clear, they fund development and work on the tooling and spec for their own use-case - they garner additional support, momentum, and goodwill by releasing the language under an open definition (and sometimes also release an open version of the tooling around the language).
I don't really know what the author wants from a package management tool. At least personally - I fully expect it to communicate with the package host provider, and for them to track information about what I'm downloading... It's a network based tool that fetches remote resources someone else is hosting (usually for free).
Decent package managers will also support self-hosted repositories, and allow configuration for 3rd party repositories.
I also don't find this sort of tracking particularly malicious... not any more than I would find it both reasonable and sane for a store to be tracking how many customers they get a day, and to pay attention to what their hot-selling items are.
Further - GCC is absolutely and example of a corporate provided language being adopted and tooling developed outside that corporation's control. Not sure what the author is smoking... but C was developed under corporate control at Bell labs of AT&T. Further - there's still a wild amount of closed source tooling around C that comes out of Microsoft, and is absolutely high quality (and not cheap).
Mono is an example of this for C# - Corporate language, open implementation. Javascript was developed by Netscape (another corporation) and now has dozens of different runtimes. Some open, some less open.
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Basically - What the fuck is the author talking about?
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#83[deleted]
Good for you, but I don't quite get the reasoning. I wouldn't expect any guarantee that Google will fund work on an experimental open source project indefinitely, or to pay for work they no longer care about. But why not accept funding on a temporary basis? When they get bored with the experiment and funding dries up, or they want to go in a direction you don't like, the source is out there and you could keep going on your own.
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#84This appears to be extreme aversion to risk. From a cost/benefit, it doesn't make sense.
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#85I tend to agree with this type of stance against corporate ownership.
Simply because ownership is power. Power in the hands of individuals is harmless as it is mostly Brownian motion; on the other hand, power in the hands of huge corporations (or governments) can turn nasty very quickly.
This is the reason I stopped using VSCode even if the tool is very good.
Ownership is too important, with heavy long-term political consequences to be ignored or traded for short-term convenience.
Basically, anything running "in the cloud" or slowly converging to run there should be a red flag.
Without being paranoid or a luddite, you can do everything with mostly local-tech or at least diversified enough to avoid giving too much power to a single actor.
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#86Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.
Since the 70s, Washington has largely abandoned public investment in favor of the private sector. Zero surprise that this dynamic emerged in the software industry.
Of course, in an alternate timeline where the government successfully funds public/"open source" software, this post would be titled "Stop Building on Government-Controlled Languages".
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#87My response to the plea in this article is simply "No thanks." If Go gets that bad, I'd be happy to use an ungoogled fork of it, or migrate to another toolchain or language, or whatever needs to happen. But until then, I'm not going to preemptively switch ecosystems and banish technically good options from my tool belt because I have fears about what could happen. I want production quality toolchain and runtimes. Tha…
Maybe we should be investing more time into creating meta-platforms so that we don't need millions of dollars to bootstrap production-ready languages.
Exactly. This is something I believe will happen in a few decades (progress in this are is very slow).
The JVM showed that a runtime can host a multitude of languages, compile to multiplatform bytecode that require only a "small" runtime (the core of the JVM is pretty simple, the complexity is on the stuff on the edges, like the stdlib) to run on anything and can be ported easily to any architecture. WASM is the new incarnation of the idea and if the people behind its specification stop worrying about politics and start getting stuff done, I am almost sure it will become the new "universal" runtime.
Usually, new programming languages have a huge mountain to climb in terms of libraries that are required for everything these days (encryption, multiple data formas like YAML, JSON, XML, TOML and even the old ones that are still widely used in niches, like ASN.1... HTTP, Database Drivers, logging, monitoring, graphics, mathematics, the list goes on and on... we don't really want to rewrite all the stuff that exists... but interop between languages is very hard and sometimes very inefficient unless it's based on a common set of primitives (like Java bytecode... WASM still needs a lot of features like GC and interface types to be a real alternative).
Zig and other languages that have very good and easy interop with C work around this problem. But I think that the future will be a universal runtime, maybe WASM, maybe something else that doesn't exist yet (or that's not yet known to most of us).
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#88[deleted]
I work for Google now on an open source project, and have worked on open source language projects for them before.
This is just not how things happen. At all.
There's a lot of fear in our post about things that _could_ happen, but haven't actually happened in Google's history, or aren't unique to corporate sponsorship.
> 1. I wouldn't be able to refuse if they told me to add tracking, analytics, AI "learning", or lock-in mechanisms.
Google just doesn't do this with OSS projects. I've never seen on mine, or heard about it in others, or heard news of problems. I did work near a CLI that sent some usage analytics back (so they could see crash reports, etc) and some people complained, and it was removed. It was never nefarious and the idea that Google is trying to make better ad profiles or somesuch via OSS projects is frankly ludicrous.
> 2. If at any point they thought that Vale competed with Golang, they would shut it down. It doesn't matter that they're completely different (Vale doesn't even have a GC); if any person in the chain of command even had the _perception_ that it did, Vale would die. > 3. If at any point they wanted the headcount for other things, they would shut it down.
How is Google stopping funding a OSS project any worse than Google never funding it in the first place? They can't "shut down" the project any more after paying you to work on it than before paying you to work on it. If you want to work on it for free, just do so.
Yes, you _might_ have to fork the official repo if it got moved to under Google's GitHub orgs, but contrary to your fears, Google has a good track record of handing off OSS projects they don't want to maintain. There's a whole OSS office to help with this and an official process for transferring ownership and copyrights.
You're also allowed to work on non-Google OSS projects for 20% if it fits in the spirit and goals of 20% time, so if Vale is even vaguely in-line with Google work and goals, you could have just... worked on it. Did you actually talk to anyone at Google about this?
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
"they've embraced Linux containers in Azure and WSL on windows" I am open to the possibility, that Microsoft changed, but this example is a classic "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" tactic by my understanding. Linux is strong with developers and certain tech, but by incorporating Linux, Microsoft makes devs have many good sides of linux, but with all the nice proprietary windows extensions. So they stay on windows. A…
Do you know any linux users that have switched from linux desktop to Windows because of WSL? I think it's just leading to Windows devs embracing Linux.
I know it keeps me more on windows, when I do not have to switch to the linux partition to do something particular and I see new devs not making the switch to linux at all, when they can get the job done on windows.
Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
#90Yes and instead build on languages and frameworks with no guiding principals or cohesive strategy like the clusterfuck of the front end ecosystem and Node.